


Return to Sender

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/M, Fluff, Long-Distance, Postcards AU, finally reposted from tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 04:04:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3963715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Jemma wants is to get her prototype back.  Or, a "person A sending postcards to the wrong address, person B sends them back (with increasingly snarky/flirtatious notes)" AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Return to Sender

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ardentaislinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentaislinn/gifts).



Jemma Simmons was irritated, vexed, and extremely close to writing a strongly worded (but still polite) letter to the American postal service. They’d returned three letters to her in the past week alone, first claiming that the zip code was incorrect, then that the postage stamp had been slightly too large for its designated box, and finally just scrawled return to sender across the envelope. She’d double and triple checked the address, paid the correct postage down to the half-cent, and still…nothing. The letters had been her last resort really—she’d texted, called, emailed, contemplated sending a messenger pigeon…And still nothing from her dumb as a rock ex-boyfriend and no sign of the important prototype she’d given him as an ill-conceived Christmas present. (In her defense, she’d been looking at his biceps when he first asked her out.)

She flipped the letter over, scowling at the postmark, and paused. There was a note on the back of the envelope, in bold, messy handwriting. _Reeve no longer lives here_ , it read. _For f**k’s sake, stop sending letters. I’m pretty sure that you’re not getting back together._ Well. That was just inaccurate. Boyfriends were easy to find, her prototype significantly less so. (And _if_ she had wanted to get back together with Reeve, she could have had him wrapped around her little finger in days.) Jemma grabbed an envelope and then a bigger one. The first one had her letter to Reeve, politely requesting that he return her prototype and the second one was addressed to the…grumpy recipient. Could she technically call him that? (He could just as well be a she, of course, but the jam and toast stains, as well as one that rather resembled shaving cream, seemed to suggest otherwise.) Well, if he was going to be that rude, she could call him whatever she liked, she thought indignantly. _To the grump in apartment three_ , she wrote. _For your information, I have no interest in..._

The letter came back two days later, return to sender scrawled across the top again and another note below it. _I couldn’t stand in the way of scientific progress. Tell me what’s so important about this prototype—how are you going to change the world?_

_If you’d let me send you an actual letter, instead of trying to avoid paying the postage, I’d tell you._ Jemma stuck another stamp on the letter and pitched it into the mailbox with a sigh of satisfaction. Oddly enough, this was rather fun. Long-distance bantering. If it could be called bantering? Perhaps she’d have to step up her witticisms if the prototype really was still there. The sun was shining, the cute barista working at the coffee shop had given her an extra scone, and today even her eternally scowling lab mate couldn’t ruin her day. “Good morning, Dr. Fitz,” she called cheerfully. Dr. Fitz mumbled something back, doing his best impression of a hibernating bear. (She had a theory that the lack of any kind of vegetable in his diet had put him in a perpetually bad mood. Or just the fact that HQ had refused to approve his plans to build a time machine.)

She got a postcard the next day, in the same bold, messy handwriting. _The last guy who lived here left a bunch of boxes in the crawl space. I tried picking them up to toss them but they were too heavy. Probably barbells or something—your ex-boyfriend turned half the living room into a gym. (It took forever to get rid of the parallel bars.)_ He’d signed it from the grump in apartment three and Jemma actually giggled when she read it. Dr. Fitz glanced over and made another grumbling noise.

“Did you need something?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even. She’d heard all kinds of things about Dr. Fitz’s brilliance before she’d been transferred to Sci Ops, and she’d read his articles for years—she’d even thought, when she’d first heard about her transfer, that maybe they could work together. but in the past year and a half, he’d barely spoken more than two sentences at a time to her. She always smiled, she always said good morning—she’d even tried making him tea, at the very beginning of her time at Sci Ops—but whatever Jemma did, he just kept on looking at her like she’d dropped in from Asgard. 

“I, um…er…it’s nothing,” he blurted out, staring resolutely down at his lab table. Jemma just shrugged and returned to her letter—she had to have a stash of postcards somewhere, maybe from Costa Rica. She thought that her mysterious correspondent might like the ones with monkeys.

_He’d never have left his barbells behind—he once canceled on me because there was a talk at the gym from a “fitness specialist”. The prototype might be in there. I’m going to need you to unpack everything very carefully. Don’t touch anything directly and make sure to keep the boxes away from light and at a cool temperature._ She’d underlined the last sentence twice.

_This prototype doesn’t exactly work, does it? Assuming that you finally want to tell me what it does?—The grump in number three._

_It was supposed to be a self-cleaning kitchen set for romantic dinners, but the microbes were a little…over-enthusiastic. (I ended up buying him a sweater too that Christmas.) If you get covered in suds, don’t panic. It’s all perfectly safe—it ever cleans up after itself–and the absolute worst that could happen is that your apartment gets a good cleaning._ And possibly a newly alphabetized set of bookshelves. The teapot tended to be a little over-enthusiastic, but she didn’t put that bit in.

_Prototype successfully retrieved, although my scientific journals did get reorganized in the process. That teapot has issues._ He’d written something there, then crossed it out. _I’m an engineer and I was thinking that maybe I could fix some of the glitches in it, if you let me keep it a little while longer. I promise I can make that candlestick behave itself._

 

_Want to send me your credentials first?_ Jemma wrote back. _~~I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.~~ (I didn’t mean for that to be suggestive.)_

_They’re kind of classified. I can give you five true things about me, though._ He wrote that message on the back of a postcard from the local waffle house and Jemma grinned when she spotted the maple syrup stains.

_Engineering credential things?_ She found a postcard from her and Bobbi’s favorite brunch place and drew in the powdered sugar on the French toast.

_Nope, better. True things:_

_I used to take things apart all the time when I was little. The radio, the toaster, my mum’s watch. But, after a while, I got really good at putting them back together._  
I make really excellent bacon and eggs and really terrible everything else.  
I am scared of spiders. My roommate has to deal with it if one gets in.  
I think that figuring out something works or, even better, knowing that I made it work is one of the best feelings in the universe.  
There’s a girl where I work—a girl that I really, really like– and I’ve been trying to impress her for as long as I’ve known her, but I turn into a bloody idiot whenever she’s around. I think sometimes that everything has a balance—I’m bad with words but good with machines. 

Five days later, a box showed up on her doorstep, addressed to the genius in number eleven. _Your ideas are brilliant_ , he’d written on the back of a menu from a Chinese takeout place. _You just needed a little bit more of the mechanics, and it would have worked perfectly. What’s your specialty?_ Beneath the menu, there was her kitchen set. And (magically, miraculously) it all worked. The pans washed and dried themselves, the teapot poured tea exactly to her specifications, and the candlestick lit itself on cue. When she inspected the teapot more closely, she found that he’d even made it possible to set it to different people’s preferences, so the same teapot could pour five entirely different cups of tea in one sitting. It was…amazing. And, as Jemma stared down at his handwriting, she knew that she had to find him.

It wasn’t irrational, she told herself. She needed a proper lab partner (really, she’d needed one for years, someone to come up with the distribution systems for her dendrotoxins, who’d know what she wanted the minute that she said it instead of having to send long strings of emails back and forth between her and Engineering) and clearly, whoever he was, he was perfect. If his work was classified, he had to be working somewhere at SHIELD, didn’t he? 

“So you want me to hack into the system to find some guy’s handwriting?” Skye said over the phone, her sigh echoing down the line. “I’m reformed now and everything.”

“Not hack,” Jemma corrected. “Just…ask politely. And maybe do some analysis? And send me the results as soon as you can?” She blurted out the last bit, fast enough that her words blurred together into an indecipherable mass, and winced to herself. Maybe she should have thought this out a bit more before calling Skye. Or drunk a little less wine.

“Jemma, have you ever thought of just asking him? Like if he wants to get coffee and make weird science-y things with you?”

“But I can’t…I don’t even know who he is,” Jemma protested. “I almost feel like I know him, but that’s not possible. Look, I just need a lab partner, all right? The engineers have started making up excuses whenever I walk into one of their labs.” _And I need to prove to him that my bacon and eggs are definitely superior._

“If you just need a lab partner, why don’t you request one?” Skye asked patiently.

“Because I’ve done it before and it never quite worked out,” Jemma sighed, remembering an endless series of screaming arguments and queasy stomachs and spilled cups of tea, all promptly followed by an equally endless series of transfer requests. “But I know that he’s the right one. He fixed the candlestick, Skye, and if he can–”

“I think I know who he is,” Skye blurted out. “And I think you might need to meet him yourself. OkayIloveyou, byeee!” She hung up before Jemma could even mention the postcards from Peru and if she thought that meant that her correspondent was on a field team. Or if Skye could possibly get her the lists of field teams. Well then. Jemma reached for the bottle of wine. Time to write a letter.

_Dear grump,_

_I’m biochem. Biochemistry. Important science stuff. Anyway, can I buy you ~~a drink a cake~~ a coffee? (It is coffee, right?) As a thank you, because clearly you’re the only person around who’s as smart as I am. Anyway, if you want to, meet me outside Hall’s Coffee on Saturday at noon. ~~I’ll be the nubile young prodigy with above-average fashion sense.~~ I’ll be wearing a blue sweater._

_Yours,_

_the genius in number eleven_

Three days later, Jemma had no idea what she had been thinking. Except that she hadn’t been. But there she was, wearing a blue sweater and standing in front of Hall’s Coffee, her latest lab notebook tucked under her arm. He probably wasn’t going to show up anyway—it had been an awfully drunken letter and he’d never shown any sign of being interested in a relationship that didn’t involve awkward postcard writing. Not that it was a relationship but–

“Dr. Simmons?” Dr. Leopold Fitz, former child prodigy and grumpy work-mate, was staring at her and she’d never noticed that his eyes were that particular shade of blue before. “Did you, um…were you…is it you?” He held up a worn letter. Jemma just stared at him, mind running through a million sets of probablities until he turned a deep shade of red and she realized that he’d asked her a question.

“I, er…yes? That wasn’t supposed to be a question.” Jemma dug a stack of postcards out of her purse and tried to hide her blush. “So it was—I didn’t know that you were that smart. I mean, I’d heard about it, of course, and when I read your papers, they were all brilliant but whenever I talked to you, you just mumbled things and I thought that you…”

“I was trying to think of the right thing to say. To impress you. Because you’re…you.” He waved a hand vaguely in her direction. “And I’m not very good with people.”

“You’re good with machines, though. I brought one of my notebooks along,” Jemma took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders, hoping desperately that he wouldn’t turn and flee. “And I thought maybe you could look at it? I’ve designed this specialized neurotoxin that Ops is interested in but I need a dispersal system for it and I’m in need of a partner, as it happens. And you’re the best that there is.”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s you. But I could take a look at it? If you want me to?” _Oh, did she ever._

It took less than a week for their partnership request to go through and less than a month for people to start calling them Fitzsimmons and less than two months for people to start asking her if they were dating, and less than two and a half for Jemma to admit that maybe she wanted to. It took her three months to kiss him, though, in the middle of an argument in the lab over what to call their new non-lethal weapon. (And no, they still weren’t calling it the Night Night gun.) She claimed it was because she was on the verge of losing their argument. He claimed it was because she wanted to. They were both right.

The morning after, she wrote him a postcard while he was still asleep, before she left to go get bagels and coffee,

_To the grump currently in my bed,_

_For your information, I have a great deal of interest in you. And me. Together. For as long as possible. (If you don’t mind?)_

As it turned out, he didn’t mind at all.


End file.
